Weekly Highlights from our Conservative Overlords

Monday, October 17, 2011

The 1 % - Week 24 - Oct 12-17

Okay. Enough with the link roundups. This start this week with something fresh. There's been a lot of talk of income inequality in the US. The Top 1% has 40% of the wealth, etc. How does Canada fare.

There's no numbers here, but this graph shows we're not quite as bad as the US. That's not quite what I'm looking for (The Gini coefficient does seem to be the standard for how these things are judged), but I guess it makes sense that we're somewhere in the middle, well behind Denmark but ahead of the US. It does suggest that we're getting worse.

That Stat doesn't really cover things. There's no nice comparable to the top 1% headline grabber in the US. Digging deeper, here is the motherload. Let's got to page 73, table 8-1. Assume 25 million people in Canada and that each household is 5 people. That might not sound quite right, but the assumptions should balance out in the end. So, 5 million households and each quintile is approximately 1 million. Average household wage is $61,000. Multiply that out, and we have $305 Billion in wages earned by Canadians. Of that, the bottom 20% earns an average of $7,100 per year. Which isn't much. The top 20% earns an average of $156,300. Let's multiply that out:

Bottom 20% - $7.1 Billion total earnings - 2.3% of total income
Top 20% - 156.3 Billion total earnings - 51% of total income

Guess who thinks the old Liberal Government did a great job of running Canada's finances? Tony Clement! It's funny what these guys will say when they don't think Canada is listnening. Maybe Paul Martin will run for Liberal leader again?